Comments on: Does easier content make for friendlier MMO communities?https://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/
MMOs and game designFri, 12 Dec 2014 22:24:23 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.com/By: Ellifain @ Khaz'Gorothhttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22188
Wed, 14 Nov 2012 04:03:29 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22188The issue with player behavior primarily is due to the LFD/LFR tool.
Pre tool – Back in BC, you had to manually (and often slowly) form groups from tradechat or area chat.
If you got an idiot or douchebag in your group, word quickly spread to your guild, other players in the run guild, and eventually the whole server.
I can remember more than a few players who were essentially banned from running heroics as their history of bad behavior had caught up with them.

Then came LFD. At first the self imposed good behavior of players seemed to work, but it didn’t take it long to begin to degrade.
People quickly caught on that there were nominal repercussions if one acted like a douchebag. Sure you might get votekicked, but just queue right back up once the timer had expired. – and the timers for kicking people allowed quite a large amount of mischief and annoyance to be done before they could be kicked.

As long as there are no significant downsides for behaving badly, people will continue to do so.

The nerfing of content with the panda expansion is just making it easier – both 85-90 content and the massive difficulty nerfs with leveling dungeons.
You can deliberately pull all sorts of stunts and not die.

Ive been leveling up a protection paladin (with heirlooms) and at around level 60 after a woeful group I realised it was easier to solo instances from then on than run with a group of retards. Sure instances wouldn’t be completed as quickly, but I would be getting FAR more exp from the trash (rediculous amounts actually), no run sabotage and all the loot :o)

]]>By: Vims (@VimsC)https://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22172
Tue, 13 Nov 2012 06:14:22 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22172Well, we all know the pitfalls of making generalizations from anecdotal evidence, but I don’t think gameplay has that much of an effect on community at all. It’s the crowd itself. People tend to be ‘nicer’ in novel situations and smaller communities. WoW is an old MMO with a large population of jaded/power gamers. To them, other players are just necessary evils of the genre. The community may become friendlier when this group moves on.
]]>By: Around the ‘Sphere: Maturity | T.R. Red Skieshttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22171
Tue, 13 Nov 2012 03:44:32 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22171[…] started a discussion with the question: Does easier content make for friendlier MMO communities? I’m not so sure, but she seems to think that if Mists of Pandaria is any testament then […]
]]>By: Allectushttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22161
Sun, 11 Nov 2012 23:56:26 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22161I’ve found my experiences in MoP to be the opposite of what you’re encountering.

Cataclysm was rough near the beginning, but I really believe that after a few months, the difficulty of the dungeons caused pug groups to develop at least a certain amount of patience, cooperation, and some tolerance for mistakes. I found it far more enjoyable than the LFG environment in late WotLK.

In MoP, the gogogo mentality is back in force, DPS pull when they feel like it regardless of the tank or healer’s readiness, people leave or kick at the slightest inconvenience, outbursts of profanity for no reason, and a strange refusal to call people by their names (When did so many people decide it was to was too hard to call me something other than ‘tank’? I’ve always seen that as a bad sign)

All these behaviours have been part of WoW since the beginning, but in MoP the number of incidents seems far higher to me. I used to enjoy pugging as a way to meet new people in the game, but now I’m retreating more and more into a close circle of guildies and a few RealID friends.

]]>By: Valerijanahttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22160
Sun, 11 Nov 2012 18:20:17 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22160I find pugs generally well behaved and competent enough to finish instances. My worst experience comes from before LFD, I played a hunter and was on a half dead server. If I was out of luck and my tank friends completed their daily, I could have kissed goodbye to doing instances. LF 1 more DPS – mage is what my pugging experience boiled down to in those days. I am probably one of the silent masses who actually benefited from the system.
]]>By: spinkshttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22150
Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:56:06 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22150You’re right, it does depend a lot on how you define ‘friendlier’.

I take the view that people are far far more averse to angry, aggressive groups than they are biased towards chatty ones, so my definition is mostly around how to minimise the amount of nastiness. I don’t care if people aren’t pro-social (well, I do, but for the purposes of this exercise I’ll count ‘says nothing’ as being friendly).

But even beyond WoW, I’d say that public groups are going to be friendlier – at least to newbies and less experienced players – when the content isn’t too challenging. I’ve seen that in Rift and GW2, the public dynamic events aren’t hard if you have enough people and public groups are fairly chilled out. I don’t think they would be if the content was difficult.

]]>By: NoAstronomerhttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22149
Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:47:11 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22149Personal observation is that what caused the issues in Cata (and I personally did have problems running instances in Cata even Deadmines) was the change between Wrath and Cata. In Wrath instance were fairly easy, in Cata they got more difficult and the go-go-go people with short fuses who expected 20-30 minute runs lost it. I took advantage of a come-back-to-WoW offer about 3 months after Cata’s release and I played for a week. In that week I could not complete a single instance

I think harder instances do make for more social PUGs. When you have to talk about tactics and assign roles beyond tanking and healing such as crowd-control and buffing then the communication barrier breaks down and people start talking to each other.

To sum up: I don’t think that the Easier Content makes for Friendlier Communities theory necessarily holds true. For one thing how do you measure friendly, because the current WoW community would seem to fall very far short in that regard. I do think that introducing ‘hard’ content to a community that expects face-roll content is going to lead to a lot of frayed nerves.

]]>By: kiantremaynehttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22142
Fri, 09 Nov 2012 06:54:07 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22142I don’t know about difficulty – I think matching levels of capability makes for better groups. A lot of the PuG drama seems to come from tension between the uber-geared guys doing this dungeon for the millionth run and the newly levelled guy here for the first time. Groups learning a dungeon together seem a lot more tolerant of wipes and delays than when you have some people learning and others farming.
]]>By: Redbeardhttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22140
Fri, 09 Nov 2012 01:12:52 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22140I was thinking of the impact of your reputation as a player if you were an asshat in the pre-LFD days. In the era of the multi-server LFD grouping, there’s no social pressure to not behave like an asshat, whereas in the pre-LFD days you and/or your guild ended up with social repercussions in-game if you developed a reputation for asshatery.

Believe me when I say that I like what LFD did for the game, because it enabled folks like me who play at odd hours to get some instance running in. But at the same time, it’s also a tradeoff, because people feel that they can get away with anything in an LFD. And they often do.

]]>By: Shintarhttps://spinksville.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/does-easier-content-make-for-friendlier-mmo-communities/#comment-22137
Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:39:20 +0000http://spinksville.wordpress.com/?p=6956#comment-22137Interesting theory. I can’t comment on MoP pugs, but I would have expected the opposite, that harder content makes for friendlier communities, because there is an actual benefit to co-operating with your fellow players in such an environment. Also, I’m not sure I would describe a community where people more or less ignore each other because they’ll succeed regardless of everyone else’s behaviour as actively “friendly”.
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